US

Here’s Why Advice Columnist E Jean Carroll Won’t Bring A Rape Charge Against Trump

President_Donald_Trump | circa February 2018 | Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

A magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault said she would not bring a rape charge against Trump, according to an interview with MSNBC Friday evening.

E. Jean Carroll, 75, accused Trump of raping her when she 52 in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. The accusation is part of her upcoming book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.”

Bringing the charge would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection,” Carroll said in an interview with MCNBC’s “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.”

“It would just be disrespectful,” Carroll said in the interview Friday. “Mine was three minutes. … I can handle it. I can keep going. My life has gone on. I’m a happy woman, but for the women down there and for the women — actually around the world, and every culture this is going on.”

Carroll has had an advice column in Elle magazine called “Ask E. Jean” since 1993.

There have been reports of migrant women being raped by their smugglers and strangers as they travel across the border. Trump has used this danger as a reason for developing a border wall, stating that “1 in 3 women” are raped while traveling through Mexico.

Carroll’s book includes another abuse allegation and she expresses regret at not reporting that one.

A camp counselor allegedly abused Carroll when she was 12 years old. She never reported him. The first-person account was featured as an excerpt from her book in New York Magazine.

“I could have spoken up,” Carroll wrote in her upcoming book. “Maybe not when I was 12. But when I was 25.”

The White House denied the allegations against the president.

“This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the president look bad,” a senior White House official said, according to NY Mag.

Trump also commented on the allegations, saying her book should “be sold in the fiction section” and that there is “zero evidence” for the accusation, according to a statement.

Trump said:

Ms. Carroll & New York Magazine: No pictures? No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened.

False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.

If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.

Carroll said she was also assaulted by former CBS CEO Les Moonves, who resigned after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced in 2018. Moonves denies the allegations that he assaulted Carroll.